


how strange it was; how sweet and strange

by tomato_greens



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-26
Updated: 2014-11-26
Packaged: 2018-02-27 02:04:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2674781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy signs up for the Auxiliary Territorial Service in the spring of 1940.</p>
            </blockquote>





	how strange it was; how sweet and strange

**Author's Note:**

> I cut this out of the other giant Captain America fic I'm writing and I'm tired of sitting on it - I think it works on its own, but maybe someday I'll write the second half. Until then, enjoy as is.

Peggy signs up for the Auxiliary Territorial Service in the spring of 1940, the same day John’s mother calls her, crying, with news of the telegram––“Oh, I see,” she says, and the next thing she knows she’s hung up the telephone, put on her hat and gloves, and joined the Army. 

“Marital status?” the recruiter asks, pen poised over the empty line.

“Single,” Peggy says. She had to practice it the entire walk over, but her voice doesn’t shake. She’s telling the truth. It doesn’t count as widowed if one’s fiancé is killed before the wedding. 

“Right,” the recruiter answers, his voice entirely devoid of expression, and jots it down. He has very poor penmanship, Peggy notes. “Parents?”

“My father died two years ago. His lungs were damaged in the Great War,” Peggy replies automatically, and then realizes she should have said _the last war_. “My mother is still in good health.”

“Right,” the recruiter says again. “Well, Miss Carter, welcome to the ATS. You’ll receive your posting within the week, and information on where to report for training.”

Peggy stands and immediately has to suppress her first instinct, which is to bob down into a curtsy. She shakes the man’s hand instead, firmly, looking the man square in the eyes, the way her mother always told her never to do. “Thank you, sir.”

He waves her off. It is the first time in a very, very long time that Peggy has been so summarily dismissed. Something catches in her throat, burred.

* * *

Peggy hasn’t taken her dinner upstairs in the nursery since she turned fifteen. Still, the London house’s dark and cavernous dining room feels like forbidden territory, as if she’s going to walk in on a dinner party she isn’t old enough to attend. But of course there’s only her mother seated at the long oaken table, wan and somehow vague around the edges––like one of John’s pencil sketches, yet un-inked. “Darling,” her mother says. “You ought to have told me if you were going to be late getting in.”

“Mum,” Peggy starts, and then realizes she hasn’t prepared anything to say afterward. She stalls a little by clucking her tongue. “You could have started eating without me.”

Her mother shrugs and fiddles with an earring, one of a half dozen identical pairs she’s forever scattering about the house. Peggy used to make a game of it when she was small and her parents and nanny all too distracted to mind her, and she’s found them hooked into curtains, tucked between sofa cushions, even hidden among the potted palms her father had long doted over. “Why bother eating when the company’s so slow? Better to wait for you, dear, and at least be a little less lonely.”

Peggy takes a deep, calming breath as Finney comes out with the ancient blue soup tureen that has to be at least as old as Peggy is and ladles each of them a bowl. The breath turns out to be a mistake, since the soup smells very strongly of onions and potatoes; dear old Finney, who has been employed in the Carter kitchen since time immemorial and who Peggy has adored since childhood, does not know how to cook a single dish that doesn’t sit in a lump at the pit of one’s stomach for the rest of the night. 

“Thank you, Finn,” Peggy’s mother murmurs, smiling up at Finney, and Peggy finds herself bursting out with––

“I enlisted.”

The world slows. 

The tureen slips from Finney’s fingers and floats for an impossible moment before cracking on the edge of the table and crashing, already in pieces, to the floor. Peggy watches in frozen horror as Finney’s wrap and her mother’s dress are splattered with puréed potato. 

“ _Margaret Elizabeth Ponsonby Carter, you did not_ ,” Peggy's mother says at last. 

Peggy looks down at her bowl. A brownish sprig of rosemary swims to the surface, and she feels, for the first time since John’s mother called that morning, tears beginning to well up in the back of her throat. “I did,” she admits.

“Oh, my poor girl,” Finney moans, already on her knees, cradling shards of pottery in her arms.

“What in heaven’s name were you thinking?” her mother says weakly, lowering herself to the floor, clawing up the rapidly cooling potato chunks and then, having nowhere else to put them, dropping the mess into her ruined skirts.

“I don’t––John is dead,” Peggy says, and her voice cracks, and suddenly she’s slumped into herself and sobbing harder than she thinks she’s ever sobbed in her life. “John is dead, and I––I––” She loses the ability to speak, then, crying too hard to draw breath. 

“Darling,” her mother murmurs, and then she must wipe her hands off on something and leave the potatoes to Finney because she’s suddenly drawing Peggy to her, cradling Peggy’s chin with one hand and petting her hair with the other. Peggy lets herself lean in and be enveloped by her mother’s habitual cloud of Blue Carnation perfume as she realizes in one horrific flash after another that _John will never take me dancing again––John will never draw me another postcard from his great-uncle’s vulgar manor––John will never unbutton my dress or trip over my shoes––_

Eventually, Peggy runs out of tears, though she still feels as though a new and unbearable weight has settled under her breastbone. She takes three shuddering breaths and wipes her eyes. 

“Better?” her mother asks. Peggy coughs wetly, once, and her mother hastens to add, “No, of course I know you’re not better, darling, but better for now?”

Peggy takes one more deep breath––the room still smells overwhelmingly of potato––and nods, finally leans back far enough to see that her mother has abandoned her dress entirely and is standing in the middle of the dining room in her slip and girdle and sensible brassiere.

“Mum!” she cries, scandalized in spite of herself. 

“Pegleg, you’re going to see much worse if you’re, if you’re going to war,” her mother says, with a watery smile. She is very small, under all her usual layers. Peggy takes after her father’s side. “It’s better if you get used to it now.”

Peggy wipes at her eyes again and nods. “You know best.”

“And so help me, Peggy, if you don’t come home again––” Her mother has to stop and visibly restrain herself, closing her eyes and swallowing at least twice before she continues, “I’ll kill you myself.” 

Peggy lets out an ugly snort of laughter, but part of the reason she’d loved John so well was that he’d never insisted she follow him anywhere. “I plan to return in all full health,” she promises, and sits back down, her place at the table now blessedly clear of potato. “And anyway, I’m a woman, after all. I hardly suppose they’ll set me loose in the middle of combat.”

* * *

Peggy’s not as well-traveled as some of the girls she went to school with, but she’s been sunning in Nice and boating in Amsterdam and once, when she was small, her father took the family to Toronto by way of New York City. There should be nothing frightening about a three-hour train ride to Devon. 

Her mother isn’t feeling well enough to see her to the station and Finney’s much too busy, so she seizes them both up while the cabbie checks his wristwatch, unsubtle.

“You be good, Miss Peggy,” Finney orders, covering her mouth with her apron as she finally lets Peggy go. “You stay safe!”

“I’ll do my damnedest,” Peggy promises her, pressing a kiss to her cheek, then another to her mother’s. “Don’t forget to eat,” she warns.

Finney scoffs. “As if I would let her.”

The cabbie holds out one of his large square hands for Peggy’s suitcase as soon as she comes down the front steps, raising his eyebrows when he realizes it’s nearly empty. “Traveling light, are we?” 

Peggy feels like she should defend herself––the Army said not to bring any extra civilian clothes besides a dressing gown; she’s got the letter in her jacket, for goodness’ sake––but decides then and there that the Peggy who signed up to go to war is a Peggy who is under no obligation to explain herself to cabbies. So she just says, “Indeed,” as prim as her silk stockings, and steps into the car.

“Where to, Miss?” the cabbie asks. 

“Waterloo Station,” Peggy says, chin high. There is absolutely nothing frightening about a three-hour train ride to Devon, she reminds herself, and feels her face settle into something––not harsh, but hard. Adult, she hopes.

The cab rolls on.

* * *

Peggy had expected joining up would be difficult, but she hadn’t expected it to be quite so––well, _difficult_. She’s exhausted with an aching, bone-deep weariness that sets into joints after the first day and doesn’t leave again. She wants to complain, but she hasn’t anyone to complain to; most of the other girls came in with callouses already.

“Come from money, do you?” Sergeant Barrett asks her, three weeks into the training. 

“Yes, Sergeant. Sorry, Sergeant,” she adds reflexively. 

Barrett raises her eyebrows. “Don’t be. Girls can’t help where they’re from. Speak much French?”

“Well enough,” Peggy admits. Barrett has sensible hair and a calm, low voice that she never seems to need to raise. Their first afternoon at camp, she’d struck Peggy on the shoulder and admonished her for slouching her entire life, at which point Peggy had fallen into a kind of half-sick love. She wants desperately to impress Barrett, more than she’s ever wanted to impress another woman, and feels utterly incapable of doing so.

“Might be we can find something for you,” Barrett muses. “Keep on, Carter. You’re more useful than I expected you to be.”

Peggy’s face tuns hot with praise, and she mumbles, “Yes, Sergeant,” as respectfully as she can. 

“Back to cleaning the latrine with you, then,” Barrett orders, grinning widely, and Peggy just barely stops herself from running all the way there.

By the end of the six weeks, Peggy has made two real friends; they’re called Hattie and Laura, and they are the first women her own age she’s ever actually liked. It’s all rather marvelous: she can hoist a rifle, she can peel potatoes without slicing off her thumb, she’s developed no fewer than three discernible muscles, and Hattie, who’s from Grimsby and gleefully refers to herself as a fishwife, has taught her to swear like a man. 

“You’ll do, Carter, you bloody aristocrat,” Hattie crows on the last day before their posts are announced.

“My father was a soldier and a businessman, he didn’t have a title,” Peggy insists, as she always does, uselessly as ever.

Laura rolls her eyes and pats her on the shoulder, condescension clear in every line of her body. The next day, she and Hattie are sent off to aid the war effort in London, and Barrett takes Peggy aside to meet with a shifty-eyed gentleman who forces her to converse in her polite schoolgirl French for half an hour. 

“She’s fine, but she’s useless to me,” he mutters to Barrett when she comes knocking. “Send her in for typing or whatever it is you use your girls for in this godless country.”

“If you weren’t such a shit conversationalist, I’d have been a lot more impressive,” Peggy finds herself whipping back––in French, at least, so Barrett won’t have understood her, but she claps her hands to her mouth as soon as she’s realized what she’s said. Barrett snorts, obviously unimpressed.

“Ah, then she does talk!” the man says, raising his eyebrows. “Perhaps I spoke too soon. It seems she may have a brain after all.”

Barrett rolls her eyes. “I’ll get the General on the line, if Private Carter can hold her tongue that long, hmm?” she says.

* * *

She can’t stop thumbing through her first set of false papers, looking again and again at her new name (Delphine-Marie Moreau), her new age (23), her new parents (Joseph Moreau, a French shop owner, and his English wife Beatrice, which will hopefully explain away Peggy’s slight accent).

“Are you ready?” asks Marc, still shifty-eyed but a great deal nicer now that he knows she doesn’t faint at the sight of blood.

“No,” she says honestly.

“Yes you are,” says Marc. “Welcome to Paris.”

* * *

Peggy’s first black mark comes after six grueling months in dirty Parisian basements, almost fifty sleepless hours, and a very near miss with a pistol that had, obviously and luckily, last been cleaned in 1918. 

“You’re a go-between, Carter, not a goddamned spy,” her commanding officer spits, looking down his nose at her with obvious disdain. “You play around like you’ve got state secrets again and the next thing you know, you’re dead––or worse, some of my boys are dead, and we’ve got no lines into the Resistance at all.”

“Yes, sir,” Peggy says, and carefully does not share her own feelings, which include the words _your boys_ and _utter incompetence_ and _you blind pompous fathead_ in a very incriminating order. She doesn’t know whether to look at her shoes or at the wall behind his head, which he’ll think is more disrespectful. In the end she keeps her chin up.

After he’s shouted himself hoarse, the officer sighs, “You’re dismissed, Carter. Take the evening. Get the hell out of my sight.”

Peggy puts on one of the civilian dresses she’s been allotted in her undercover work, a dowdy blue thing that smells like mothballs but at least hides her breasts, and brings two bottles of wine over to Marc’s dirty Parisian basement. If she’s lucky, there won’t even be any rabid nationalists in it. 

Marc answers the door barefoot and in his shirtsleeves. It’s a cold, wet winter, completely dreadful, but Peggy can feel the warmth radiating from inside the apartment. “Delphine! What are you doing here?” he asks her in French.

“Oh, I was just in the neighborhood. I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

“No–o,” Marc says, which Peggy knows from experience means Yes. “I’ve some guests, but you’ve brought wine. Come in, will you?” He scratches his nose and raises only his left eyebrow, which put together mean _Germans or German-sympathizers––on the hunt_.

Peggy, as she was told not an hour ago, is a nuisance to the English intelligence-gathering community. Peggy says things that no one wants to hear and hears things no one wants to say. Peggy is definitely supposed to be lying low. 

“I’d love to,” she answers.

* * *

Once it’s all over, Marc wipes the sweat from his upper lip and says, “You do good work. I’ll put in a good word for you.”

“ _Jesus fucking Christ, Carter_ ,” her commanding officer says when she gets back to base, handing her the notice of her commendation. “ _Never again._ ”

Peggy writes Hattie and Laura, who send her back perfumed stationery and a terrible poem from one of Laura’s many suitors. She writes her mother. Finney writes back: her mother is too ill to hold a pen, but they are both so, so proud.

* * *

They send her to the States, after smuggling Erskine over the border earns her a fourth commendation and a medal. She is assured that it is neither a punishment nor a demotion. “The opposite, in fact,” her commanding officer explains, stroking his mustache contemplatively. She imagines cutting it off, along with the tip of his nose. “You’re a wild card, Carter, you’re a risk. We’re not ashamed to admit we need those leadership skills, but the field is no longer the right place for you.”  
“  
Yes, sir,” Peggy says. She tightens her fists. “Thank you for your guidance, sir. I’ve learned so much about what to do in difficult situations from you, sir.”

Marc comes over as she’s packing away her uniforms. “It’s not right, what they’re doing to you.”

“Promoting me?” She looks into her closet and decides she deserves her two favorite dresses––the hideous blue one and a red one that makes her figure pop. Very Rita Hayworth, very _look but don’t touch_ , just Peggy’s style. In her peripheral vision, she can see Marc’s jaw clenching and unclenching.

“You will miss me very much,” he says in his accented English. 

“I will miss you, you mean,” she corrects him. 

“Isn’t that what I said?” he asks, and she lets him take her to bed.

* * *

General Phillips is without any doubt an uncouth American, but he’s very good at his job. Maybe even better than Peggy is at hers, though she’d never admit it. 

“You are here in a probationary capacity, Agent Carter,” he says, and Peggy takes comfort in how easy it is to squash her reflexive flinch at being called _Agent_ rather than _Corporal_. “We don’t even know that this––this Scientific Strategic Reserve is going to work out, you understand? Erskine and Stark might seem act like they’re pretty sure of themselves, but I know you’re old pals with Erskine and Howard Stark’s even nuttier. There are no guarantees here. For any of us.”

“I know how this goes, General,” Peggy assures him.

Phillips eyes her up and down, maybe least sexual glance she’s ever gotten from a man. “Yeah, I guess you do. Erskine’s got a lab set up in one of the outbuildings. I’m sure he’d like to see you once you’re settled in.”

“Thank you,” Peggy says, and feels, suddenly, like she might muddle along here after all.

* * *

She writes her mother again, but Finney’s letter comes only two days after she’s sent her own. _She went quickly at least_ , Finney writes, _and gave all her love to you as her last_. The SSR’s entire operation is too precarious to let chief personnel go; Peggy won’t be able to get to London in time for the service. There’s nothing for it. She writes a brief eulogy to supplement whatever her mother’s eldest brother comes up with. Then she puts on her red dress and her most devastating lipstick, and goes to knock at Stark’s door.

“Va va voom,” he says in lieu of hello. “What brings a beautiful, talented dame like you to a poor rich slob like me?”

Peggy allows herself one extravagant eye roll and ignores Stark’s resulting indignant squawk. “I need you to get me drunk, Mr. Stark.”

Stark backs up, looking genuinely nervous. “I––look, Peggy––Agent Carter––not that any man wouldn’t be lucky to get such an obviously thoughtful invitation, and believe I’m kicking myself about this, but I really think––”

“Howard,” Peggy interrupts, raising a hand. “I am not after your virtue, nor do I wish to hand you mine. I’ve just had some rather awful personal news and I would like very much to forget it for the night.”

“Right, denial helped by the immoderate application of alcohol, now that is something I can definite help you with,” Stark says, and throws off a salute. “Let’s go get Erskine, he’s got a stash of the good stuff. And he’s hilarious when he’s drunk,” he adds conspiratorially.

Peggy likes Erskine at least three times as well as she likes Stark, so it’s not hard to follow Stark over to his room and let herself be sat down and given a cup, let Erskine pour her a glass of something that smells like nothing so much as ripe-to-rotting plums. Sweet. 

“To the future! Come on, around the circle. Everybody’s got to toast,” Stark insists. 

Erskine looks skeptical, but clinks his glass against Stark’s and says, quietly, “To the success of our mutual project.”

“To my mother, may she rest in peace,” Peggy says when both Erskine and Stark look over at her. Stark blanches, Erskine’s face creases with sympathy; Peggy tosses off most of her glass and sets it on the table, hard. Stark pours her another, heftier finger without prompting. 

“You think we can do this?” she asks, much later, after most of the bottle has been poured, drunk, or spilled. “Truly? Change the war?”

Stark’s too far gone to be paying much attention, but he mumbles something about, “Vita-Rays, baby, the wave of the future,” before collapsing back into his chair.

Peggy turns to Erskine, who is frowning down at his hands. He is very kind, she thinks––he doesn’t have Howard’s charm, but he’s got a lot less disdain in him, too. “I think we must succeed, or else we must die trying,” he answers eventually. “This war cannot go on.”

* * *

On paper, it will only take them a week to decide which man should be the first injected with Erskine’s magic serum. This is, of course, a lie: the recruits will all go through the first six weeks of their basic training together before fifteen are chosen to continue on with the SSR and the rest are shuffled off to war. But Phillips is needed too many places to be there for longer than the last week of the project, and seven days looks neat––even better, cheap––so Peggy types it into the report. Shaping the narrative, she finds, is one of the few benefits of having to do her own paperwork.

* * *

Steven Grant Rogers, twenty-six years old and lately of Brooklyn, is a little blond blue-eyed slip of a thing, pretty enough to be a girl if he weren’t scowling all the time. He’s not hard to pick out in the line of Phillips’ jowly Cro Magnon men, even without Erskine’s deliberate chin jerk in his direction. Rogers is clearly thrumming with nervous energy; she doesn’t think he’s a man given to restraint, considering his five attempts to enlist, but it seems as though as he’s learned it somewhere. 

He must have spent too long among his books as a child; Peggy has never met a man so incompetent at talking to other men, and he gives her nervous glances whenever her breasts get too close. But he’s persistent and clever, and she finds herself growing distantly fond of him. She mentions him in a letter to Marc, who writes back, _I would almost be jealous if I didn’t know so well you were not a thing to be claimed._

“He really claimed he was from New Jersey?” she asks Erskine, the night after all the men arrive. Even in their quarters, with everyone sitting down and dressed in identical white undershirts, Rogers stands out; he appears to have packed a small library with him. A foolish thing, but admirable. “That’s dire straits.”

“He really did,” Erskine says, shaking his head and shuffling the papers in his hands. 

Erskine always seems to have papers or folders or bizarre medical instruments on his person, no matter if he’s in his lab or not. Peggy plucks the reports from between his fingers and replaces them with a glass of her finest cooking sherry. “Take a load off,” she says in her best American accent. It comes out sounding plasticky and strange, and Erskine is clearly snickering at her, so she gives it up as a lost cause. “Really, do sit down. Stark will be back soon, and I’d rather he not take liberties with my furniture.” 

Erskine obediently sits in her single chair and sips his sherry, wrinkling his nose in distaste. “My god, all the world to choose from and this is what you voluntarily drink?”

“There’s a war on, in case you’ve forgotten, and not all of us have the salary your genius commands,” Peggy quips as she sits down on her bed. She carefully mentions neither Paris nor the wine she drank there––the bottle of Lafite-Rothschild Marc had liberated from one of his German contacts and that he had shared with her on their last night, twined together in bed. “Besides, my mother’s housekeeper used to slip me sips of it when I was young.”

“Ah, so she ruined you at a formative age,” Erskine says wisely. “I might have known. The British love to drink, but you have no finesse at all.”

Peggy is saved from having to defend the honor of her native land when Stark swaggers in and steals Erskine’s glass, then the bottle still in Peggy’s hand. “Miss me?”

Erskine snatches the glass back, eyes popping behind his spectacles. “I take it back, Agent Carter, you’ve got all the finesse in the world.”

“I feel like I should be insulted, somehow,” Stark muses, then shrugs and swigs from the bottle, hopping up on Peggy’s desk as he does so. “How about that Rogers kid, huh? What a riot.”

“He’s certainly something,” Peggy agrees. She can’t quite stop herself from smiling, nor from swiping the sherry away from Stark again.

“I think he is the best hope we have,” Erskine says gravely, and they can all drink to that.

**Author's Note:**

> Sources: Anne de Courcy's [Debs At War: 1939-1945](http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0753820781/virtonthevirtuat); D. Collett Wadge's [Women in Uniform](http://books.google.fr/books?id=P_5I4ENEHOIC&pg=PA114&dq=auxiliary+territorial+service&hl=fr&sa=X&ei=-0HWU-GsFsey0QXb_4HQCA&ved=0CDsQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=auxiliary%20territorial%20service&f=false); the [Wartime Memories Project](http://www.wartimememories.co.uk/main.html) and the BBC's [WW2 People's War](http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/). Title is from "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" because I am unimaginative.
> 
> You can always come hang out with me on [tumblr](http://tomato-greens.tumblr.com) if you are so inclined!


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